Abstract
It is apposite that, in this era of living “covidly” and its far-reaching consequences, when community and family have been at the forefront of many of our concerns, The Journal of Family History offered this reader the opportunity to review a new collection of multi-disciplinary essays focusing on the ways in which women, their families, and their diverse communities navigated trauma, hardship, and competing identities in medieval and early modern Iberia. It is moreover befitting that the volume itself is dedicated to the late Helen Nader whose work and mentorship “has inspired generations of historians of women in premodern Iberia” (n.p.). In a 1992 interview for The Historian, Helen Nader was asked by Roger Adelson if she had any advice for young historians. She responded: My advice to young historians is to keep reading documents in as many languages as you can master. Good judgment comes from experience, and historical insight comes from broad familiarity with thousands of archival documents. With that experience you can trust your hunches, even when they go against the standard interpretations. (My emphasis. “Interview with Helen Nader,” The Historian, September, 1992, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6563.1992.tb00881.x)
Some three decades on, Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, is testament to, and vindication of, Nader's pragmatic and durable advice to those just starting out on our historians’ journeys as well as those of us who have been following our respective chemins de long estude (paths of long study) for a substantial period of time.
Added to this is that, if one really wishes to apprehend the diversity and complexity of the past, premodern Iberia, and indeed the wider Mediterranean, is an excellent choice of time and place and to study not least because of its multiplicity of extant archival sources (particularly those held in the Arxiu General de la Corona d’Aragó) and because of its ethno-religious and cultural diversity—a diversity highlighted by the contributors to this collection.
With contextualization at the forefront of its imperatives, the volume opens with an editors’ introduction, “Contextualizing Women, Agency, and Communities in Premodern Iberia.” The editors draw much-needed attention to the not infrequently ignored reality of studies into the past that “context matters when studying communities as multiple and intersectional factors relating to socioeconomic status, religion, location, and gender impact the ways in which they were shaped and understood over time” (1). Next, the editors challenge the assumption that there was a disconnect between the medieval idea of community and premodern individualism, arguing instead that by reinserting women at the center of community, “we can see the similarities and differences across the medieval and early modern period of women influencing, navigating managing their roles within their communities, including testing the bonds and limitations of the communities within which they operated” (1–2). The collection emphasizes continuity, revealing that women “from across the socioeconomic and religious spectrum—used similar strategies to maneuver within the patriarchal structures of premodern society, using their embedded community roles as a means to do so” (2). The essays bring to the fore the diversity of women across the estates of premodern society and shed light upon the complexity—and at times the messiness—of women's lives. They make excellent use of the sociological tool of network analysis to exam the intersectional nature of women's lives through a variety of lenses, exploring “the multi-varied and interwoven networks of women of different religious, socioeconomic, and geographic regions” (3) within which their protagonist women were embedded.
The twelve essays contributed to the collection are divided coherently and interconnectedly into three parts: “Community Networks and Economic Agency”; Challenging Communal Ties”; and Institutional Relationships and Creating Communities,” which correspond directly to the three lenses that the collection applies to address its meta-theme of women and community. They are economic agency; how women challenged their communities; and how institutional connections created communities among women.
Part 1 opens with, Sarah Ifft Decker's essay, which examines notarial records to understand how Jewish women money lenders exercised their fiscal agency by playing an important role in Vic's credit market. They were positioned to do this by virtue of community tradition as well as recognizing the “complex interplay of the needs of both the Christian majority community and the Jewish minority community” (6). Deckers concludes that while Vic during the period she examines was a very specific manifestation, “the unusual case of Vic in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries reveals that communities could make different choices about the role women played within networks that tied the community together” (34).
The traumatic period of the 1391–1392 anti-Jewish riots in the Crown of Aragon is the focus of Natalie Oeltjen with her targeted case study in chapter 2. Oeltjen explains how, in the early hours of August 2, 1391, an angry mob, who had started out by ransacking the houses of the elite and rioting, moved on to the Jewish quarter of Mallorca “fed up with the city magistrates over decades of political underrepresentation, and a fiscal exploitation that had driven them into debt with Jewish creditors” (41). Jewish women, who had converted to mitigate the danger with which they were faced, soon found themselves marginalized and affected by the post-riot environment to a much greater extent than their male counterparts. Oeltjin digs into the threats to conversa property in general and their vulnerable dowries in particular in the face of two post-riot consequences: the exile of a vast number of Jews and conversos; and the re-creation of the former Jewish aljama into a discrete fiscal entity from 1390 to 1410 when the rule of the Aragonese count-kings of Barcelona was dynastically extinguished, their final monarchs dying without direct legitimate male heirs. Her archival sources reveal how the conversas were specifically altered by royal and fiscal policies and demonstrates the ways in which “conversa property was woven in to the wider fabric of the converso community” as recorded by converso petitions to the Crown. Things got moving, for by the time the calendar flipped over to a new century, sources show traces of the community's support of their women's economic health, “providing dowries that allowed poor women to marry,” and lobbying for the community's general welfare which in turn led to the creation of converso confraternity in 1404, formalizing “communal welfare just as the Jewish aljama had done previously” (53).
Widows, widowhood, and their testamentary beneficiaries provide rich and rewarding lenses by which to reflect upon premodern gender and fiscal agency and this is precisely what Grace E. Coolidge does in chapter 3. Coolidge not only focuses upon the elite citizens of Toledo but also day laborers and maid servants. This might surprise some of us, however, as Coolidge explains “will writing was a spiritual exercise, regulated by the Roman Catholic Church in the decrees of the Synod of Zaragoza (1357),” as well as an important issue of “heredity, succession, and distribution of property” (61) set down by Alfonso X's Siete Partidas, later reinforced by the Leyes de Toro in 1505. While widows have often been recognized as wielding more formal economic agency than single women or spouses, in her careful examination of the economic activities of these three groups, Coolidge nuances received ideas, demonstrating that there are points of convergence in women's experiences “across the life cycle” (69). She concludes her study with the important assertion that “The social ideal was that women's economic resources be controlled by men, but the reality of women's lives meant that this was not always the case” … and that testamentary evidence reveals “the presence of strong economic ties between women of different social stations and all life cycle,” creating “a narrative of female economic agency that is remarkably consistent across class and marital status” (72-3).
Part 2 commences with Michelle Armstrong-Partida's essay, exploring three primary issues: why women were the targets of clerical abuse; what motivated clerics to use brutal force against women; and how the community reacted in either defending and protecting these women or instead abandoning them. She argues that by shedding light on the situations in which women received support from their male and female fellow parishioners we can gain “insight into the dynamics of gender in the community” (85). Armstrong-Partida takes us on a fascinating and informative journey through her vividly portrayed case studies of actual women and their particular circumstances as well as the divergent responses of their fellow parishioners in light of the violence to which the women were subject. Gossip is raised as an important lens by which to ascertain how the community felt about the attacked women and sometimes it was gossip itself that led to the women being attacked. Context too is at the heart of her analysis as is the importance archival records, calling to mind Nader's advice quoted at the top of this review essay.
Violence is also the theme of chapter 5. Mark Meyerson, however, strikes out along a different path to Armstrong-Partida by focusing on the ways that “Valencian women who incited men-folk to enact retribution and appeared in court to either bring a claim or to refute a claim of aggression against their enemies” (7). Both Armstrong-Partida and Meyerson articulate the ways in which female speech played into a culture of honor and consequentially made them the focus of male violence. Myserson points to the importance of the household and its threshold as a locus of honor and transgression in the fourteenth-century Valencian community interactions. He gives considerable nuance to the weighty issue of gossip by examining female antagonism, providing much-needed balance and context to the easy, and often insufficiently examined, binary of female victims versus male oppressors.
In chapter 6, Alexandra Guerson and Dana Wessell Lightfoot delve into the complex and fraught issue of conversions in Girona yet another consequence of the 1391 anti-Jewish riots tackled by Oeltjen in chapter 2. They discuss the various interactions between the inquisitor of heretical depravity, Joan Vilar, and mixed couples consisting of converso husbands with Jewish wives who had refused to convert in the face of sustained coercion. Following numerous attempts to pressure Jewish wives of converso husbands to capitulate, the evidence of which is clear from the significant number of surviving notarial records held in the Arxiu General de la Corona d’Aragó, the king and queen of Aragon, Alfonso V and María of Castile, chastised the bishop specifically for the inordinate “vexations and molestations” experienced by such families. Marriage was the cornerstone of premodern communities and Guerson and Lightfoot explore how Jewish wives, despite their husbands’ conversions, put their family networks to work in supporting them in times of trouble as well as the ways in which conversion could drive a wedge and break apart marital unions under the combined pressure from all community stakeholders—Christian authorities, members of both Jewish and converso communities, and indeed their own kinship networks.
In chapter 7, Stephanie M. Cavanaugh explores the collective legal action taken by a group of Morisca women, mostly widows, to defend their community, properties, and shared neighborhood in Valladolid. Central to their communities, as guardians and keepers of preconversion faith and customs, Morisca women took collective legal action to block initiatives by the Crown and Church to assimilate the Morisco community by scattering them from Valladolid's Barrio de Santa Maria. Financially well-positioned by virtue of their property, houses, and as heads of their households, these women asserted their standing and came to terms with the Valladolid Inquisition to safeguard the integrity of their community. The documents examined by Cavanaugh provide us with yet more evidence of “the gap between prescriptive patriarchal ideals and the daily reality of women's legal and financial autonomy” (157).
Part 3 opens with Mireia Comas-Via's essay wherein she tackles the issue of the other side of the coin of widowhood—needy widows who, in the absence of a welfare state, had to find ways and means by which to address the pressures of newly-impoverished life. Comas-Via makes the salient point that widows, from diverse social backgrounds, did not necessarily have the wherewithal to sustain their social and economic status. To mitigate their changed circumstances, and in the absence of family networks of support, many fourteenth-century impoverished widows living in Barcelona, rather than turning to parish charitable institutions, looked to informal charity from the women in their community—to caritas forthcoming either from women of means out of friendship and a sense of fellowship, or from women in their own situation who had found ways to look after one another by living together in mutual and caring support. Some such support came from the ties of neighborhood while others came by way of affective ties established through their workplaces. Comas-Via does not suggest that these women were without options in the form of institutionalized charity flowing from parish churches and the charitable works of the monarchy. Instead, she draws our attention to the fact that there were many sources of assistance to which impoverished widows might turn. Comas-Via outlines these various options in significant detail, backing them up by her targeted and transparent use of surviving documentary evidence.
Chapter 9 brings us the very welcome contribution of Miriam Shadis whose essay tells the story of the permeable cloisters of the prestigious house of Santa Maria de Celas founded by two royal women, Sancha and Teresa, “who insisted on their status as queens,” daughters of Sancho I of Portugal and his consort Dulce of Aragon. Shadis emphasizes that both the term “community” and the idea of “cloister” in thirteenth-century Coimbra were permeable and porous. Despite being established beyond its city walls, the cloister was not removed from its “outside” community. Moreover, Celas, as explained succinctly and effortlessly by Shadis, managed to shift its “initial profile of the community from being simply elite, or noble, to being part of the religious family life of Coimbra” (209).
In chapter 10, Michelle M. Herder continues Shadis's theme on the permeability of the supposed strict confinement of the cloister and the reality of nuns being very much a part of, and of considerable interest to, their local communities. As was the case for Shadis's nuns of Celas, community for Herder's nuns did not consist solely of the one within the walls of their house. Herder recounts the case of Constancia de Palol a senior member of the nunnery of Sant Daniel de Girona, who fell pregnant to one of Girona's cathedral canons, Felip de Palau, and the strategies by which the community's abbess and prioress attempted to mitigate the potential scandal arising from their “dangerous liaison.” Herder demonstrates how wider community talk accepted the nun's social interactions and that they were objects of considerable interest beyond the cloister walls. All of this talk and community-held knowledge was revealed and recorded by a scribe during a routine visitation to the nunnery by its bishop, Ennec de Vallterra. Despite all the precautions taken by the abbess and prioress, the cat was very soon out of the bag. Herder's is not merely a salacious tale of “naughty nuns and randy priests,” instead it is an evidence-based examination via extant sources of the ways in which “neighbors accepted the nuns’ social interactions within the broader community and in large part refrained from condemning the nuns as sexually unchaste due to the sexual transgression of one nun,” (9) suggesting that “people were protective of the monastery and its nuns” because they formed and integral part of their broader community (9).
Networking, and its vital importance to being heard and establishing one's humanist credentials and place in the community of intellectual discourse, is the topic of chapter 10, Rachel F. Stapleton's essay. Stapleton notes that the frivolity of courtly life was a frequent topic of criticism in Luisa Sigea's letters and writings. However, a place at court arguably was essential to the survival and prestige of a succession of humanists—male and female—with many comparisons that might have been drawn by Stapleton to enrich her understanding of Sigea's situation. One that comes immediately to mind is the case of Christine de Pizan (d. ca.1430), who, while not as skilled a Latinist nor indeed as polyglottic as Sigea, certainly enjoyed the same genre of prestige in France and beyond as Sigea later would. Male humanists too were prompted to establish their relevance and longevity by consciously and deliberately building and nurturing their literary and political networks and communities via their extensive and targeted epistolary. The point here is that Stapelton's essay might have been strengthened by some comparative work to better contextualize the very valid points she seeks to make.
Amanda L. Scott's essay brings us to the final chapter in the collection. Hers is a fascinating study of community and remembrance viewed via the experience of seroras, women who occupied a liminal space between laity and religious life—“not uncloistered religious women, but rather diocesan employees” (263) whose job it was to oversee the care and embellishment of shrines and religious artifacts and objects. This responsibility offered seroras leadership roles within their communities. Scott demonstrates convincingly that through their testamentary depositions and remembrances to their wider networks of family and friends, seroras were “first and foremost lay daughters, sisters, aunts, and cousins of the lay parish community” (264). Scott makes excellent use of testaments to build her thesis, emphasizing that “testaments preserve, in written word and legal form, the networks obligations, friendships, debts, hopes, and fears that existed outside of formal records, and which shaped the day-to-day experiences seroras shared with their communities” (251), and, as such, stand as the testators’ durable memorials.
The collection comes full circle with Allyson M. Poska's conclusion, observing that the volume represents “a complex view of Iberian women and their communities” (274) but also “significant changes in the meaning of community for women” (274) combined with “the intensity of enforcement of communities by and against women” (274) over time. This is a rich, balanced, and coherent collection showcasing the work of both early career and senior scholars working in synergy and it stands as a fitting testament to its distinguished dedicatee, Helen Nader. Its treasures are ripe for plunder by new historians and established scholars alike. Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia is a very welcome addition to the blossoming English language corpus of premodern Iberian scholarship and gender, family, and community studies.